FORT LAUDERDALE (CBS4) – Claude Counts plays his keyboard to relax. That’s what he was doing last Monday night just before going to bed and just before two masked men smashed into his home near MLK and NW 24th Street in Fort Lauderdale.

They burst in threw his back door, breaking the glass. Eighty-three-year-old Claude and his wife Alene had just gotten into bed, when Alene heard the glass break. Seconds later, Claude was face-to-face with the invaders.

“I got right about here,” Claude explained standing in the hallway, “and they were on the stairs.”

Claude was forced back into his bedroom and threatened.

“The little one was in a crouched position,” he said. Claude said the robber made a gun with his fingers and said, “don’t make me shoot you. Don’t make me kill you.”

That’s when Claude said little one took some watches from the bedside table.

Then the robbers went to Alene’s side of the bed, taking a jewelry box and a piggy bank with money for the Count’s great-grandson. Then they went back into the hallway, knocking over a jewelry box and taking more jewelry, even going after Claude’s wedding band.

“He told me to take my ring off, but I was so nervous I couldn’t get it off,” Claude said.

The Counts have been married for 64 years. What has investigators so concerned is that these guys are heartless.

“This is one of the most evil criminals I would say we have,” said Detective Kathy Collins with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. “They’re the worst of the worst and they need to be stopped!”

Claude has already had a quadruple bypass and two heart attacks and in the middle of all this; he was afraid he was about to have a third.

“With that pain, that angina, I’m thinking, ‘Oh…please leave, don’t hurt us!’ And thank God, he took care of us,”

If you know who’s responsible call Broward Crimestoppers at 954-493-TIPS.

Multiple Emmy award winning journalist Ted Scouten has been the familiar face at the scene of international stories that have affected South Florida since 1998.
Ted’s true passion is for the news of the day and has reported from CBS4's Bro...